A local development environment means installation of CiviCRM on your own computer so that you can do development without having to connect to a remote server on the Internet. We have seen in other recipes that having a local installation of CiviCRM makes things such as importing contacts faster and easier.
In this recipe—more of a set of guidelines—we explore how to set up such an environment.
We need five ingredients for our local installation to work:
A web server: Apache will serve our CiviCRM pages
A database: MySQL will store our CiviCRM data
A PHP interpreter: This works with Apache and MySQL to interpret the PHP code we write and sends us back pages of HTML
A good text editor
A good MySQL manager
Our own computers will have an operating system such as Linux, Windows, or Mac OS, and you may have come across acronyms such as a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). So, we also have WAMP for Windows, and MAMP for Mac OS.
By far...